Manipulating Atoms and a Lot More in our own Backyards

Abstract : It is an interesting and remarkable fact that every Nobel-prize winning piece of work in Experimental Physics was carried out on apparatus designed and developed by the physicist in question, be it Rutherford, Raman, Mossbauer or Binnig. I will start by taking the audience through a fascinating journey which saw my team developing Scanning Probe Microscopes and Physical Properties Measurement Systems all the way out to internationally competitive standards. I will then describe how we hav gone about enhancing the base so developed for research in material science, condensed matter physics and nano-technology, with packages for scientific computation, many designed and developed (like our instruments) essentially from scratch. By the end of the talk, I hope to convince the audience that the complete & seamless, indigenous integration of theory, computation, experiment and instrumentation, which we are beginning to achieve at QuazarTech holds out the promise (not only for us but for centers all over India) of tackling some really interesting physics problems, a few of which I will describe.